Stories of The Old Troll

Stories Of The Old Troll is a series of tales based on Scandinavian, Russian and European folklore.
These stories tell of the adventures of
The Old Troll, The Bog Witch, their fellow magical creatures and
the children of a small village at the edge of the Dark Forest.

In the Dark Forest, far away in the Northern Lands, where summer is short and winter is ruthless, lived an Old Troll, so old, that Time itself did not remember when he had been born.

Only the creatures of the Dark Forest knew what went on under those dense tree canopies, in those bottomless swamps, among tussocks and boulders, covered with green moss and bustling with large crimson cowberries...

The
winter was still far, far away, but the forest creatures already felt
a premonition of its freezing breath in the early morning hours.
Hamsters and chipmunks rushed to the fields searching for grain with
which to fill their underground stores to the top. Wood goblins
gathered barrels of clover honey and pine nuts. Trolls and gnomes
picked berries and brewed an abundance of berry jam that would later
fill hundreds of clay pots that lined up on long shelves in ranks...

Since
the beginning of time, the Dark Forest has been home to many legends,
old and new, long and short, sad and funny.

Some
of them were written in old books, books with soft leather bindings
and grey pages made of flattened reeds. Some survived only in the
memories of the Forest folk, retold over and over from mouth to ear,
year after year...

When the great and
mighty Northern Wind has completely banished his younger Southern
brother from celestial spheres, the glaciers at the tops of the Blue
Mountains that had reluctantly receded during summertime begin
happily growing back, and every living creature in the Northern Lands
knows that the time of play and joy is over. And woe to those whose
stores and burrows are not full to the top, for the Northern winter
knows no mercy...

While trolls, of course, concur hotly with that idea, if someone asked the
oldest and the wisest of the mountain gnomes, they would only shake
their heads and smile. That is because they knew perfectly well whom
the First Troll entrusted to take care of the mountains, who were the
first masons and the first...